


the eldest of the gods

by layersofsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, spans an absurdly long time and has awkward skips don't sue me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 12:55:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12109164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: Only a few people in the world get a soulmark. Soulmarks, it is generally agreed, are for special people. People who make a mark themselves; presidents and heroes and famous artists, famous enough to change the course of their time. Steve is none of those things, according to the system, but he does his little bit as best he can, and is generally happy with the state of his affairs.Besides, he’s already found his soulmate. He’d met Bucky when he was five and Bucky was six, and Bucky had just pulled one of the MacGregor boys off Steve and delivered a fairly resounding kick to the backside of the other, who was throwing rocks at a stray dog.





	the eldest of the gods

**Author's Note:**

> title from "thus numerous are the witnesses who acknowledge love to be the eldest of the gods." from phaedrus's speech in plato's Symposium, bc i am a nerd

Only a few people in the world get a soulmark. Estimates range from as much as one-seventh to as few as one-sixteenth of the total population, and Steve is fine with that. Soulmarks, it is generally agreed, are for special people. People who make a mark themselves; presidents and heroes and famous artists, famous enough to change the course of their times. There is a debate about whether the soulmarks are a cause or an effect of this brilliance; nevertheless, Steve is none of those things, according to the system, but he does his little bit as best he can, and he's generally happy with the state of his affairs.

Besides, he’s already found his soulmate. He’d met Bucky when he was five and Bucky was six, and Bucky had just pulled one of the MacGregor boys off Steve and delivered a fairly resounding kick to the backside of the other, who was throwing rocks at a stray dog.

“Take _that_ ,” Steve had snarled, picking up a rock of his own and hurling it with no small amount of force towards the already-offended backside, and both MacGregors had skedaddled.

“Say, we make a good team,” Bucky had said thoughtfully, while the dust settled.

“I didn’t need your help,” Steve spat. The sentence had seemed to lack a little panache, so he’d added, “arsehole,” resentfully. No boy who had to pass by old Brendan O’Connor’s place to get to school and back every day could call himself uneducated in the fine art of swearing, even at the tender age of five.

“I know that,” Bucky had said, and proceeded to introduce himself with a simple, “I’m Bucky,” unbothered by Steve’s attempt at a glare.

“I’m Steve,” Steve had said, more than a little grudgingly, but then he’d brought Bucky home to get his bleeding knuckles bandaged, and then ended up having to do it himself because his ma’d left for her nursing shift, and Bucky had just ended up sticking around to call Steve names and pull him out of fights. He stuck around so well that he was still building blanket forts for Steve when he was sixteen and his mother had just died.

“You don’t gotta do this,” Steve had protested, but it was utterly weak, and he’d stopped talking completely when Bucky gathered him into a hug. Everything, he believed firmly, would be if not fixed at least alleviated with nothing more than a hug from Bucky.

That sentence seemed to become a reprise for Steve, somehow, as the months wore on and he learned to live without Sarah Rogers; he kept saying it and saying it, when Bucky moved in so Steve could keep his ma’s apartment, every time Bucky scoured the classifieds or pulled strings to find work Steve could do, every time he came back with something else Steve’s stupid body needed and claimed it, “didn’t cost me that much, Stevie, honest.” It was behaviour that’d usually have made Steve burn with shame, but something about the way Bucky did it was – all right, somehow.

And besides, Steve could be there for Bucky four months later when George Barnes died in an accident down on the docks. He might have a bad – well, everything, really, but the point is that it didn’t stop him from saving up a little to buy them the softest blanket they couldn’t really afford or wrapping Bucky up in it. It didn’t stop him from holding Bucky as the two of them grieved for the man who’d winked at their excited tales when Winifred and Sarah would have tsked first.

They kissed for the first time in almost the exact same place that Steve had first clumsily wrapped a bandage around bruised hands, on Steve’s seventeenth birthday, after Bucky had tried and failed to convince Steve yet again that the fireworks were for him, and received a lapful of laughing indignant pale limbs trying to smack him for his efforts. They were too young to know properly what they were doing, old enough to know it was wrong, and determined enough not to give a shit. They just knew that it felt utterly, completely natural, like the two of them were always going to end up like this.

“Now I get what those dime novels are always sayin’ about fireworks comin’ with a kiss,” Bucky had huffed out, beautiful and grinning widely and satisfyingly breathless under Steve. Steve had punched him, and then kissed him again, and he knew exactly the kind of quip Bucky would want to make about how a fella could get mixed signals, but Steve was kissing him, so he couldn’t talk. It was, overall, an excellent state of affairs.

“Stevie, Stevie,” Bucky panted an interminable length of time later, and for a moment all Steve could focus on was the movement of those spit-shining lips, pink and swollen from kissing, from kissing _Steve_ , until he realised Bucky was still talking, “- give a guy’s arms a break, buddy, d’you wanna squeeze ‘em right off or something –”

“Sorry! Sorry,” Steve stuttered out, letting go of Bucky’s biceps and trying to smooth out the wrinkled fabric of his shirt. “Not your buddy anymore though, huh?” he added a second later, tone far too confrontational for the situation in order to mask his terror at the idea that this hasn’t been anything more than a game to Bucky, or fun, or, or _practice_ –

Bucky seemed to get it, anyway; he just grinned softly and flipped them over so that Steve was kept under him, and agreed with a casual, “Nah, guess not.” It’d seemed like everything inside Steve had just – unravelled, in that moment, and Bucky just smiled that heartbreaking smile and kissed Steve again. “My fella,” he murmured, in between kisses. “My best guy, my sweetheart –”

“Don’t tease,” Steve had said breathlessly. It was only a few words, and Steve’s throat was tight, lungs empty with longing.

“I wouldn’t dare,” Bucky murmured. “I mean every word.”

“Cuisle mo chroidhe,” Steve gasped out into Bucky’s shoulder, helpless with the bone-deep knowledge of it, and that’s when he’d known that if soulmarks were for everyone, if they painted the whole of the population and not merely a select few, he would be Bucky’s and Bucky would be his.

Most people spent their eighteenth birthdays in a haze of wishful suppressed longing that even they didn’t admit to; the oldest anyone has been when their soulmark showed up was on their eighteenth birthday, as had been the case with a lady named Dorothy, somewhere in West Virginia around ten years ago. Steve spends his in a constant state of low-lying anxiety, because Bucky’s skin is unmarked and Steve wants to match. If the stroke of midnight on July the 5th signals a particularly fervent kiss on Steve’s part, well, Bucky doesn’t protest. His own relief is clear in the relaxation of his shoulders, the way he clutches Steve to him a little tighter.

So it’s better than fine, in any case, their unmarked skin. They both know exactly what they mean to each other, and that’s more than enough. The day that Bucky gets his draft in the mail he goes and asks his ma for the wedding ring George Barnes had worn all his life, and gives it to Steve on a delicate chain long enough to be hidden under his shirt. Steve, not to be outdone, gives Bucky the ring that Sarah had worn, and laughs unsympathetically when it gets stuck on Bucky’s pinky.

“I’d say the words, but I don’t remember them,” Bucky confesses, in the silence after the exchange that had seemed almost expectant. It felt like there should have been more to it, like it deserved more.

“I love you,” Steve says. And Bucky’s the romantic one, always the one to say things that made Steve melt, so this time Steve is the one to continue. “To – have and to hold. ‘Til the end of the line.”

“End of the line,” Bucky murmurs. The look in his eyes as he leaned forward is indescribable, soft and gorgeous and perfect. Their goodbye is bittersweet, and Steve spends the next few months alternately achingly lonely and determinedly enlisting until he finds someone willing to take him.

The instant that Steve jumps on the grenade – the false grenade, he’ll find out pretty quickly – the inside of his thigh starts to burn. He assumes it’s the grenade, until he realises that’s a fake, and then he’s too shocked to really focus on the pain. “Is this a test?” he asks dumbly, and watches Erskine exchange a look with Colonel Phillips.

Erskine keeps him occupied for the rest of the day with explanations and questions and paperwork, but the stinging on Steve’s thigh doesn’t go away. It isn’t like he can check it, being where it is, but he’s suffered through much worse, so he just grits his teeth and puts it out of his mind.

Finally, finally, Erskine bids him goodnight. As soon as the lights go out Steve’s wiggling out of his pants, clumsily reaching out to turn the lamp on, and then he sees what’s causing that burning sensation and – and it’s like everything freezes.

It’s a soulmark. Steve has a soulmark.

It shouldn’t be possible. It’s unmistakeable. Ink-black, darker than any bruise could ever hope to be, a gentle curve. It looks like a C, like a crescent moon, and there’s two small dots near the bottom point of the shape, like someone has actually spilled ink on Steve’s skin.

The next thing he knows, Steve’s in the bathroom, hand full of soap, trying to wash the mark away. It stops stinging as soon as he touches it, but otherwise remains stubbornly where it is.

This isn’t how it’s meant to go. This isn’t what’s supposed to happen. Steve’s supposed to find Bucky – Bucky, oh God, Bucky –

Steve adores Bucky, he knows he does, knows it with every fibre and piece and particle of him. He’d punch the lights out of anyone who says otherwise, but when that someone is God or the universe or fate, and Steve’s own body –

He doesn’t want this soulmark. It makes him feel ill to think of kissing anyone but Bucky, to hold anyone but Bucky, to lie tangled in the sheets with a body that isn’t the one he’s loved in some way since he was five. It’s a terrible thing, not to want your own soulmate – only the worst villains in any story, in all of history, have ever rejected their soulmate, only the irredeemable and the condemned – but Steve doesn’t want his soulmate. Steve wants laughing dark eyes and gentle-quick hands and soft coaxing lips, wants familiar scraping calluses and tender grip. Steve wants _Bucky_ , and it’s not – it’s not _fair_ that he won’t get to keep the best thing that ever happened to him, he thinks, knowing it’s childish but indulging himself just for the moment.

He scrubs at his mark until the skin around it is raised and sore, and it doesn’t budge. He doesn’t realise he’s crying until the tears start to land on his mark. Even then the damn thing doesn’t have the decency to be washed away.

Steve certainly doesn’t do something as pathetic as cry himself to sleep, but his pillow is wet by the time he finally manages to get some proper rest.

He hopes, on his way to the experiment centre, that the serum will fix him.

The burning in his thigh as he staggers out of the machine is enough to tell him that it didn’t.

He puts the mark out of his mind on tour. Out of sight, out of mind, and the dazzling showbiz of the Captain America tour is enough to have Steve’s eyes firmly away from his mark. At first it’s because he is dazzled, and then it’s because he’s resentful, but either way, he’s watching his audience.

The mark crosses his mind again when he forces himself through enemy lines. How could it not, when he’s looking for Bucky? Bucky, whose unmarked skin Steve had run his lips over, the night before he shipped out; Bucky, who Steve has been calling _pulse of my heart_ since the night of their first kiss.

Bucky, who isn’t his.

Steve gives himself one shivering moment of desperate anger towards whoever it is that’s taken Steve against his will, and then shoves the whole matter out of his mind. It turns out that Steve’s fairly good at compartmentalising, now, with all the practice that he’s had with the Captain America show.

Steve lands, and gets into the factory, and runs past people and people and more people, none of whom are Bucky. He takes down guards and frees prisoners and wonders whether he’ll even recognise Bucky anymore, whether he’ll even feel when he sees the other man, or whether his soulmark’s taken that away. He’s just in the middle of contemplating how he might possibly break his own heart if he looks at Bucky and doesn’t feel that familiar gorgeous swell of emotion behind his breastbone when he does see Bucky, stretched out and strapped to a table, and oh, oh, it’s still there, it’s still there. His heart still dances at the sight of his beloved, like Bucky really is the pulse of his heart, the soulmark didn’t take that away.

“Bucky,” he breathes helplessly. “Bucky, Bucky, cuisle mo chroidhe, oh my God –”

“Is that,” Bucky says hazily, as Steve begins to work at the straps holding him down.

“It’s me,” Steve says. “It’s Steve.”

“Steve?” Bucky asks. He seems confused, but he also perfectly willing to wrap an arm around Steve’s neck and follow him blindly.

“Come on,” Steve urges instead of a proper reply, and the two of them hobble their way out into the empty deserted corridor.

“Steve,” Bucky murmurs, more sure of himself this time, pushing his nose into Steve’s neck as they move.

“I thought you were dead,” Steve can’t help but say, even though this is possibly the worst time to have a talk about that.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says, because even during a rescue he can be a fucking smart alec. “What happened to you, huh? Finally grew into that spirit’a yours.”

“Joined the army,” Steve corrects, even though Bucky’s version isn’t really far off from the truth.

“It hurt?” Bucky asks. His voice is tender, and Steve wants to weep with the sound of it, with the care in it. He doesn’t deserve it. He shouldn’t accept it, when he knows he can’t be Bucky’s the way they both want.

“A little,” he says instead, and holds Bucky tighter to him, and hopes that Bucky doesn’t notice the hoarseness in his voice.

“S’it permanent?” Bucky asks.

“So far,” Steve answers.

They leave the factory the way they’ve done everything else in their lives: together. The way Bucky shrieks, “Not without you!” across an inferno is going to be engrained in Steve’s memory forever.

Steve doesn’t even wait until the day’s out to corner Bucky. Some guy called Michael who’s better at navigating than either Steve or Bucky has taken the lead, and the initial crush of guys who want to shake Steve’s hand has died down, so Steve drops back a little from where he’s helping the stragglers along and just waits, because he knows Bucky will both notice and join him.

“Waiting for something?” Bucky asks as he appears at Steve’s side, and Steve doesn’t even wait a moment to spin them around and shove Bucky as gently as he can manage into a tree trunk. “Huh,” Bucky says, but he doesn’t pull away, only leans forward as Steve does the same so that their lips slot together.

It’s so easy. It’s so natural, and Steve could lose himself in it. His soulmark begins to burn, just a little, and then Steve does lose himself in it, pushing forward messily, desperate to kiss Bucky until the mark goes silent and accepts that this is who Steve loves. Bucky’s the one to lean back and twist his head away a little.

“Hey, hey,” he says, soothing, running those beautiful gentle hands up Steve’s back. Steve shivers, wants to push into the touch like a damn cat. “I’m fine. I’m here.”

“You’re here,” Steve echoes, and lets his forehead drop down onto Bucky’s neck, breathing in the scent of him. “You’re here, you’re here. Cuisle mo chroidhe.” Bucky twists his fingers into Steve’s hair. The soulmark’s burning sensation fades as Steve calms.

Steve should tell him. He should, but – but it’s a bad time, and they already have enough to worry about, and Bucky doesn’t deserve this to be dropped on him, and, and – and Steve doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to tell Bucky that they can’t be each other’s anymore, because Steve adores Bucky, Bucky is the beating pulse of Steve’s heart, and Steve is his in every way that matters. It is – it would be incredibly selfish of Steve to hold onto Bucky now when he plans to let him go in the future, he knows that, but Steve has no intention of giving Bucky up. His soulmate can stuff it, Steve thinks viciously, breathing in another lungful of Bucky. Steve has everything he wants, everything he needs. Steve chooses Bucky, will always choose Bucky, so surely it’s not so bad a thing to keep his mark hidden. Besides, as long as he doesn’t go around flaunting it there’s a good chance he won’t ever find his match. In the chaos of Erskine’s procedure and assassination, Steve is still recorded as unmarked, and he can’t see any government official ordering him to strip down for an inspection.

“Alright?” Bucky asks gently, and Steve presses a kiss into his neck before he draws away reluctantly. Bucky responds by pressing his lips to Steve’s jaw, for a moment, and then asks, “Ready to catch up to the group?”

Steve blinks. He almost forgot that he was part of a group, almost forgot that he and Bucky were in an unfamiliar forest where getting lost is basically the default state; lost until proven otherwise. “Yeah,” he mutters, having come to his senses at least slightly.

“Nobody following us,” Bucky says cheerfully to the men who spot the two of them coming out of the mist behind the group.

“That we can see,” Steve adds, and the guys nod and face forward again.

Getting back to camp is a relief after days of hiking. It feels like they go right back out into the field, but this time they have other men with them, and the Howling Commandos have a purpose, a mission. It feels good, to have Bucky by his side and these men behind him. It feels right.

The other good thing about the Howlies is that they don’t give a shit where their Captain and their Sergeant sleep, so long as it doesn’t disturb them in the middle of the night, or interfere with the night shifts. Bucky even dares to touch Steve in the daylight – nothing that would get them court-martialled, but a simple brush of knuckles across exposed skin, a bump from hip to hip, fingertips brushed against Steve’s neck. The Howlies either watch with neutral eyes or don’t watch at all.

“Fuck, your _lips_ ,” Steve says fervently one time. Bucky grins at him, crooked and beloved, and the Howlies, bless them, scatter.

“You’ve been kissing them since you were seventeen, what’s so special about ‘em now?”

“The serum fixed my colourblind eyes, is what,” Steve returns, tracing his thumb over the lips in question. It’s a heady fucking feeling, to stand in broad daylight and touch another fella’s lips. “Fuck, I thought they were filthy before, but – they’re so _red_. How can anyone stand just lookin’ at them, huh?”

“Hate to break it to you, but normally they haven’t been chewed on for twenty minutes,” Bucky drawls, and Steve can’t help but laugh.

The best thing about being in the field is that Steve and Bucky have an excuse to share a tent. The other good thing about being in the field is that rations are low, and tallow is a precious commodity. Steve kisses Bucky in the dark, and the two of them are rarely daring enough to go past mutual handjobs in the field. It means that Steve’s mark is safe from detection, at least, and it means that no questions need to be raised about why Steve might suddenly refuse to remove his pants when he’s having sex.

“I love you,” Steve makes a point to whisper into Bucky’s skin. “Cuisle mo chroidhe.” Bucky returns the endearments every time. Sometimes he attempts to borrow Steve’s compliment, but his Irish accent is so atrocious that it always sends Steve into fits of laughter and prompts him to kiss Bucky until he’s stopped trying to mangle the sounds of Steve’s language, or at least admitted defeat for the day.

There are plenty of opportunities to tell Bucky about his new soulmark, Steve knows that. They’re out in the field together for months, and Steve can never bring himself to say anything. He can’t help the irrational fear that it’ll ruin everything, so instead he keeps his mouth shut and tells Bucky how much he’s loved a little more often.

“Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?” Bucky asks, as the group of them look out over the snow-covered mountains where a train track is so small in comparison to its surroundings as to be insignificant.

“Yeah, and I threw up?” Steve says. It’d been on his sixteenth birthday, and it wasn’t as though he’d intended to throw up, but it had brought Bucky closer, gotten him to stroke the curve of Steve’s back and feed him water, so it hadn’t been all bad.

“This isn’t payback, is it?” Bucky asks, and Steve has to laugh.

“Now why would I do that?” he teases.

Bucky is touching Steve gently while Gabe and Monty give everyone final updates on the mission; nothing big, nothing fancy, just a gentle press of shoulder-to-shoulder, but it gets Steve to take a breath, gets him to resettle and refocus.

“Cuisle mo chroidhe,” he murmurs, as the train comes rumbling into view. Bucky smiles, repeats the endearment, and this time his accent is not quite as horrible as all the other times he’s tried to say it. Steve squeezes Bucky’s hand before he jumps.

They all make it safely onto the train.

Not all of them make it out.

Many things were screaming when Bucky lost his grip: Steve, the wind, the train on the tracks. It was so loud that Steve couldn’t hear Bucky’s scream, even though the sight of it was embedded in his mind forever.

“You loved him,” Peggy says later, in the bombed-out ruins of an old pub.

“Since I was seventeen,” Steve says slowly, “I’ve been calling him cuisle mo chroidhe.” He looks up at her, and there’s sympathy in her eyes. “Do you know what that means?”

“I’ve an idea,” Peggy says, and watches Steve down another glass, and then another.

“Vein of my heart,” Steve murmurs. “Or pulse of my heart. I always preferred the latter, myself.”

“This wasn’t your fault,” Peggy says, and Steve snorts indelicately. Of course it’s his fault, when he was the one who couldn’t catch – who reached out too late – who asked Bucky to follow him back into danger long after the other man had earned himself a retirement. If Bucky had been his soulmate, he thinks, on a desperate surge of bitterness, this wouldn’t have happened, because soulmates are meant to be together. Apparently giving Steve a mark wasn’t enough. Apparently the world had to take Bucky away as well, Bucky who was in the way of a soul-mated pair.

Steve thinks that, if he met his soulmate now, he would hate them. He thinks he’s going to hate his soulmate whenever he meets them, and he can’t bring himself to feel bad about it.

The attack on Schmidt’s fortress is a lot more suicidal than it needs to be. The Howlies exchange anxious looks when they think he can’t see them, but nobody calls him out on it. That was Bucky’s job, in the field, and Bucky’s gone. For all that they’ve spent months together, the Howlies don’t know how to confront Steve, and he knows how to shut them down.

“I have to put her down,” he calls over the radio. It feels like it was inevitable, and it probably was. Steve doesn’t feel like he’s living without Bucky.

“Don’t do this,” Peggy says, but her voice says that she has already given up on him.

When Steve sinks into icy water, he’s not thinking about his soulmark or the nebulous soulmate it leads to. He’s got his hand in his pocket where he keeps the ring on its chain, and it’s tangled around his fingers; he’s thinking about Bucky, about warm dark eyes and laughter that Steve still swears is the best thing he’s ever heard. He’s thinking about the rasping of calluses over skin, the way he always tried to press into a touch from Bucky, the way a kiss feels when it’s delivered through a smile.

~*~

When he wakes up, he notices two things at once. One: the ceiling fan above him is spinning lazily. Two: his soulmark is prickling. (An angry _that damn thing_ is his first, unbridled reaction.)

The game on the radio is the third thing he notices. When he closes his eyes to avoid the relentless spinning of the ceiling fan, the voice, the cheering, it brings him right back to a game he’d gone to with Bucky. A game he’d been at, where the sun had shone too brightly and it’d been too hot for him to press himself to Bucky but he’d done it anyway in the guise of celebration as the two of them cheered with the rest of the crowd. For a moment, he swears he can pick out Bucky’s voice in the crush of the rest, but that’s impossible.

He knows something is wrong. It is only confirmed when the woman who makes her way into the room is not regulation in any way. “You’ve been asleep,” she says, and the statement is truer than he knows.

Times Square is a scene out of a comic book, shining and unreal and unbelievable. Steve had thought he’d known what a crowd was but he hadn’t, he really hadn’t.

“You’ve been asleep for seventy years,” the one-eyed man says, and, well, that sounds more plausible than anything else Steve can think of, surrounded by the blinking evidence of the other man’s statement.

America is familiar and so, so different. Captain America is famous, a celebrity, a legend. But people have spent so long staring at iconic pictures of the suit that Steve Rogers outside of it is invisible. There was a time that Steve would have paid to have people’s eyes slide over him, and a time before that where he would’ve paid more to be noticed, but he hates this in-between.

At least before, he’d had Bucky.

Now he has a soulmark. Sometimes it prickles, and Steve still can’t bring himself to stop resenting it. His soulmate is probably in this time, and that’s why he’d needed to be frozen for seventy years, but – but there must have been other ways.

(There wouldn’t have been other ways. If Bucky had been alive – Steve would have given everything he was, everything he had, to get back to him. He knows that. It doesn’t make anything better.)

Then aliens come to New York, and Steve can put everything aside for a little while to focus on the improbability of aliens out of a science-fiction book, on needling new teammates and eating shawarmas with fellow fighters so exhausted that they can’t even talk.

“Now it isn’t that I don’t like you, Susan,” Steve can remember Cary Grant saying in exasperation, in a quiet cinema that Bucky had charmed the two of them into, empty enough that the ticket seller hadn’t cared and they’d been able to hold hands in the darkness, “because, after all, in moments of quiet I’m strangely drawn to you, but – well, there haven’t been any quiet moments.” It is possibly exactly how Steve feels about his new team, and eating a shawarma in a perilously dilapidated hole-in-the-wall marks their first quiet moment together. Steve is only slightly horrified to find himself amenable to a continued working relationship with them. They’re not the Howlies, who had easier smiles, darker humour, and less personal issues, which was saying a lot for any group during a war, but they work well together. They bring different things to the table.

The Avengers don’t dissemble after the Chitauri attack, but the satisfied smirk on Nick Fury’s face suggests that he already knew that.

“Any such thing as a time travel machine yet?” he asks Tony idly, long enough after the Chitauri thing that New York is alive again and people are already singing overly-patriotic songs about how the world ended when America took a few knocks.

“Nah,” Tony says, looking up from whatever he’s currently tinkering with, but the look in his eyes is a little too knowing for Steve’s liking as he asks, “Why? You keen to get rid of us that quick?”

“Eh,” Steve says, and forces his shrug to be at least some degree of dismissive. “Your dad promised me one in fifty years, is all. It’s a bit overdue.” It’s a cheap way to get out of an uncomfortable situation and he knows it, but it works, and Tony’s lips thin as he refocuses on whatever he’s holding.

“He had a habit of not keeping his promises,” he says, with no small amount of bitterness.

Without aliens to keep him occupied – well, Thor – without hostile aliens to fight, Steve is not good at hiding how badly he’s doing. He doesn’t sleep in the bed Tony gives him and ruins an ungodly number of punching bags. He scrubs mercilessly at the mark when he takes the time to shower in a way that is anything more than utilitarian. He’s unnecessarily self-sacrificing during missions, and because he heals, because he has a record of doing stupidly selfless things, nobody thinks to question it. Steve misses Bucky so much that it aches, in those moments that he feels like somebody should be telling him he’s a stupid asshat who takes too many risks, and how to make things safer for himself.

They say time heals all wounds. Steve’s runs grow a little less punishing, and he thinks that probably counts as healing. He misses Bucky, but the ache is not as sharp; it’s a little sweeter, even, because Steve can think of all the happiness they had together without immediate self-recrimination. It’s still hard to breathe his way through the nighttime without another body by his side to anchor him, but he’s working on it.

“Come out with me,” Natasha says once a week after they’ve worked a few missions together, like clockwork. “There’s a Lebanese place I want to try.” Or Italian, or Vietnamese, or Japanese. Always something new.

Even though he turns her down countless times, the first time that Steve says, “Sure,” Natasha doesn’t even blink an eye.

“Don’t bother dressing up,” she directs, like it’s as easy as all that.

It is as easy as all that. Steve puts on a cap and a pair of glasses and passes for invisible on the streets. The Indian place is easy to find, as is the fiery splash of Natasha’s hair amongst the other diners. And the same goes for the next week, and the week after that. They eat in companionable silence, at first. Sometimes it is interspersed with bitching about their most recent missions, or sometimes Natasha adds to Steve’s pop culture catch-up list either with her own suggestions or Clint’s, but mostly they just sit and eat while the rest of the world talks and surges and spins around them.

They’re placed together on missions more and more often. Natasha takes to bringing takeout to their base on what passes for a Saturday in whatever timezone they’re in, and they continue their scintillating tradition of eating in silence.

“How’s Clint?” Steve asks one Saturday. Strike Team Delta is somewhat legendary in SHIELD, after all; Natasha wouldn’t be paired with anyone but Clint if they could help it.

“Recovering,” Natasha says with a shrug. “Deafer than he was. He says he’s met a nice girl.” There is something running under her tone that warns Steve to stop asking, so he does.

Steve can use a phone now, and a laptop. He can navigate the Internet with relative ease. It feels like he’s adjusting to the New York of 2013. It feels like he’s leaving Bucky behind. He is moving forward, and he hasn’t even said Bucky’s name in – too long.

Once, he tries to watch _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ , alone in his flat and missing Bucky so much that it aches. The film only makes it worse, bad enough that it takes him four hours to drag himself off the sofa. He does not try and recreate their experiences again.

“You’re not doing well,” Natasha observes the next day. Of course it had to be a Friday that Steve pulled that fucking stunt, he thinks bitterly. “Don’t get me wrong, you never were. But this is worse.”

Steve only shrugs, exhausted. “I miss…people,” he says lamely, because he’s so used to being vague about it, so used to leaving that behind, treating it like another person’s old life. Natasha frowns.

“Peggy’s still alive, you know,” she says.

“I know,” Steve says. It’d been in his file, under _Contacts_. _Margaret Elizabeth Carter, b. 1921_. He’s been a coward about that. He doesn’t know what he’d say to her.

Natasha doesn’t give him a choice.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Peggy says sternly when she sees Steve at the door of her room. Steve doesn’t know whether this is a product of actual waiting or the Alzheimer’s he’d been told she suffers from, but either way an, “I’m sorry, Peggy,” seems appropriate for the situation.

“As you should be,” Peggy huffs. “Keeping me waiting like that. Seventy years, Steve!” Her accent is exactly as crisp as Steve remembers, sharp consonants and well-trimmed vowels, and her eyes are still the same wide-set light brown.

“Seventy years,” Steve agrees. He doesn’t mean for it to come out negatively, but something must leak into his tone because Peggy’s firm demeanour yields and she moves to pat his hand with hers, now so thin and wrinkled.

“How’re you holding up, hm?”

“Not great,” Steve admits on a sigh. “I – I miss him, Peg.”

“Yes,” Peggy says. “I imagine you would.” There’s a pause, and then she bursts out with, “It must be simply awful, seventy years passed and you didn’t even know it – so much has happened. Everyone you knew is gone or like – like me.” She stutters the last part of the sentence out through a series of coughs even as she waves away the water Steve offers from her bedside, but picks right up again once they’ve passed. “I’m sorry I can’t be more empathetic, or even sympathetic. What you’re going through is beyond imagination.”

“It helps just to hear someone say what you did,” Steve admits, and ducks his head at her small, pleased smile. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“A girl can hope, Captain Rogers,” Peggy says demurely, and then ruins it by coughing again. This time she accepts the proffered water, and Steve can only watch as one of his dearest friends seems to shake herself into and then away from the pale brittle weakness that seems to characterise people her age.

“Oh, don’t look so tragic,” Peggy says. “Go read my biography, I had a good life.”

“Did you tell them we were together, in your biography?” Steve asks, steering the conversation into lighter territory. “Because people keep asking me what you were like to _be with_ , and then they wiggle their eyebrows.” That description really only applies to Tony, but the fact remains that a disproportionate amount of people seem to be under the impression that he and Peggy had an affair somewhere along the way during a war, from news outlets to more news outlets to bloggers and micro-bloggers, as the Tumblr people are apparently known.

“I did not,” Peggy says, as dignified as one can be while talking about having sex with someone who looks to be around seventy years her junior. It is surprisingly more dignified than Steve would expect. “It is a rumour that has haunted me throughout my career, because God forbid that a man and a woman be _friends_.”

“Amen,” Steve says.

So now he has two people that he sees on a regular basis: Natasha every week for comfortable food-eating, and Peggy every free week that he has for catching up. Most times she remembers him, but sometimes she doesn’t, and it’s terrifying and earth-shattering and tragic the first time and – a little more normal, the next. She forces him to watch The Great British Bake Off, and even on the days that she doesn’t remember him she’s happy enough to watch it with him regardless of the fact that he is nobody to her.

“They tell me that one of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s is a lack of enthusiasm for previously enjoyed activities,” she tells him. “And I say, the Great British Bake Off overcomes little obstacles like degenerative brain diseases.”

And then she goes and convinces him to run outside more, instead of using Stark’s treadmills. Steve doesn’t even know how she managed to wrangle the promise out of him, and just to be obstinate he starts his morning runs at a time where no sensible human being should be up and thus he has a reason to be suspicious of and avoid his fellow runners. Peggy takes this in her stride and rolls her eyes exasperatedly.

“You’re a little shit, Rogers,” she says, and cackles.

Natasha, for her part, doesn’t even try to be subtle about setting Steve up, but she does have the courtesy to ask Steve about each date beforehand so that he can say no.

“You know you’re allowed to move past – Peggy, or whoever,” Natasha says once. “I’m sure whoever you had doesn’t expect you to live the rest of your life as a celibate monk.”

“It’s not that,” Steve says, and, well, that’s partly true. It wouldn’t be fair to any of the girls Natasha’s trying to set him up with if he went in with his heart already taken, because that is what has happened. But since Natasha has just deemed this answer a bad one, Steve thinks a soulmark is another solid reason.

He still doesn’t know how to feel about his apparent soulmate, either. A part of him, a large part of him, still recoils from the idea of anyone but Bucky. A small part has mellowed enough or is lonely enough to think tentatively about giving this soulmate thing a try, and an even smaller part is holding on to the bitterness of being forced away from Bucky by blaming his absent soulmate. Logically it makes very little sense, but emotions have never been particularly logical.

Regardless: he’s not ready. And Natasha, bless her, respects that, so while she might extoll the virtues of Erin from media or Katie from finance she doesn’t force Steve into anything, even lets him steer the conversation away from romance when he deflects.

“Peg,” Steve says, about six months after he’s started visiting, on a particularly good day for her. He’s been promising himself that he’s going to do this for some time now, but the situation just never seemed right; that one wide-eyed orderly who tried to listen in on all the conversations was on duty, or it’s a bad day for Peggy, or he just goes and chickens out.

“Well, spit it out,” Peggy says, once a few seconds have passed.

“Uh,” Steve says, already regretting having opened a line of conversation. Peggy will definitely catch on if he tries to say something else now, though, so he forges ahead as best he can. “What’s the future’s opinion on, um, on soulmarks?”

Peggy sits up straighter, “You do have one! I suspected – god damnit, why did Gabe go and have to die on me before we settled the bet,” she complains petulantly. “But the way you and Barnes were with each other, of course you did. I told him –”

“It’s not Bucky,” Steve says, and juts his chin out when Peggy stares, openmouthed. “Neither of us had marks. I got mine when I jumped on the grenade, and never filed the new paperwork because I was Captain America.”

Peggy leans back, mouth still slightly open. Her eyes, though, go from sharp to sympathetic and sad in an instant. “Because you already loved him,” Peggy say. “The future’s opinion on soulmarks…they’re rare. But it’s even rarer that anyone looks for relationships outside of them.” She shrugs. “Or maybe we the public just don’t hear about those cases. If I may ask a question,” she continues, “where is it?”

“Inside of my thigh,” Steve says. “Fuckin’ inconvenient, if you ask me.”

Peggy is – far too perceptive. But then, her job was basically founded on being perceptive enough, so when she leans forward to touch Steve’s knee it’s not entirely unexpected.

“Give them a chance, Steven,” she murmurs, and it only takes that to open the floodgates.

“I just keep thinking – how unfair it is,” Steve blurts out, and he’s only a little embarrassed to find tears in his eyes. “If he’d been my soulmate – he could have stayed. I could have caught him. Everyone knows soulmates are meant to be together. And he was – he was holding me away from mine.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Peggy says.

“You told me that before.”

“And did you believe me?” Peggy asks, raised brow and sceptical lips. Steve has to shrug.

“I do now,” he says, “more. But there’s still – that resentment there. I don’t want to meet my soulmate and hate them because they took me away from Bucky.”

“So take your time,” Peggy says. “You’ve a lot of it. You’re young yet, Steven Grant,” she adds. “I’ll tell Natasha to back off with the girls.”

A few months into Steve’s newfound petty early morning runs another guy starts to appear increasingly regularly on the same or a similar route.

“It’s not going to take you long to crack,” Peggy predicts, once Steve complains to her about the sanctity of his dawn runs being broken. “You can’t not be an arse for too long.”

It seems rude to tell an old woman to fuck off, even when that old woman is well able to take it, so Steve only grumbles. She’s only proved right, in any case, when Steve heckles the new guy’s running within the fortnight.

“So you finally talked to him, huh?” Natasha asks, when she collects him and after she’s told him the basic details of their new mission.

“I don’t know what you mean, finally,” Steve says, as dignified as he can be. “Stop gossiping about me with Peggy.”

“Peggy is an incredible woman,” Natasha says. “You should feel lucky that you come up in our conversations.”

~*~

And then – well. Nick Fury is shot in Steve’s apartment, and he sees a man with a metal arm, the kind of futuristic development he’d half-expected of a modern America. And then he sees that man’s _face_ , and it can’t be, but it is – and Bucky doesn’t _remember_ –

He goes to New Jersey with Natasha, and then back to Washington. It seems absurd that he can make so many momentous discoveries in the span of only a few short days, but they are all there, just waiting to be found.

His soulmark fucking burns the entire time he’s fighting Bucky, like it’s fucking jealous or something.

“I’m not gonna fight you,” Steve says, begging him to stop, to _see_. “You’re my friend.”

“You’re my mission,” Bucky says, and something in Steve flinches at the words, at the fact that it is Bucky saying them, more than the punches themselves.

“Then finish it,” Steve says, and it feels like snapping into place. “’Cause I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.” Bucky’s _eyes_ , in that moment – it tears Steve apart. He wants to lean up and kiss the other man, wants to make everything better in any way he can, but in the end he can only close his eyes as he falls.

He doesn’t remember the river past hazy impressions: blue, pressure, cold. Then tightness, gripping his shoulder, and breath that comes clearly. Then, probably some time later, Sam and Nat, leaning over him with concern in their eyes, even Natasha.

“You should be dead,” Natasha says, and only someone who has spent nearly two years’ worth of weekends listening to her talk over various cuisines could hear past the clinical observation in her voice to hear the worry there, the distress.

“Yeah,” Steve rasps, and finds that he feels good – well, not good, but sufficiently recovered – enough to sit up against the tree behind him.

“Woah, woah, man, don’t – don’t do that,” Sam frets, hands fluttering over Steve’s torso and general facial area. “We can’t move you! It makes internal injuries worse.”

“I heal fast,” Steve says. “Perks of the serum. And I hit the water at a fairly good angle.”

“You hit the water with the debris so the surface tension didn’t kill you,” Natasha says. “Don’t make this about you.”

“It is literally about him,” Sam protests. “How do you even know –?”

“Like I said, he’d be dead,” Natasha says. “Or in much worse shape. Broken bones and internal bleeding. You’re lucky, Rogers.”

“I promise, it looks worse than it feels,” Steve tells both of them, and they relax slightly. It is probably only a little worse, but he’s not about to admit that, and he really is feeling better by the second. “I need to know what you know about Bucky,” he says to Natasha, and the reluctance on her face is obvious. “HYDRA had to have kept records of him. It’s all public now.”

“I know,” Natasha says. “I know. But I saw some of it while it was going up, and – Steve, it’s bad. It’s really bad.”

“I knew it would be,” Steve says, softer. “I just – I wanna find him, Nat.”

“You fought him,” Natasha says, looking, admittedly, reasonably doubtful. “He shot you.”

“He saved me,” Steve says. “It’s not like I swam out of that river myself.”

Natasha turns to look at the still-littered Potomac. “Guess not,” she says, and her voice is thoughtful.

“I cannot believe you’re sitting here with injuries that’d kill a normal guy and talking about your old friend,” Sam says. “The entire intelligence community has probably been shook to its core and you want to talk about one guy.”

“One special guy,” Steve corrects him, and tries to get up, which proves to be a mistake. “Ow, ow, nope.” Sam and Natasha watch him, and both of them have a terrifyingly similar _it’s your own fucking fault_ look in their eyes.

~*~

Steve does try and find Bucky, but in the end it’s Bucky who finds him. In the end, he doesn’t need the information he’d requested from Natasha. He’d tried to read it, he had, but sometime during the second page he’d devolved into increasingly horrified skimming instead of actual reading, and even then he failed to make it past a third of the folder. He’d used rumours instead of hard information to follow Bucky’s trail. Natasha would have disapproved, but Steve couldn’t bring himself to read even the abridged version that she’d been kind enough to put together. Steve’s followed the rumours Bucky leaves in his wake to Brooklyn, which makes sense as a location, at least, and is just standing on the sidewalk like a mook when he hears a familiar voice behind him.

“Hey, Stevie.”

It’s like the entire world gets taken apart and put back together in the span of the breath that Steve draws in too quickly and nearly chokes on while he spins around. And, _oh_ , Bucky is behind him, hair barely trimmed, both arms shoved into the pockets of the jacket that is too big even for him, dark circles under his eyes, but he’s Bucky, and he recognises Steve, and he’s _smiling_.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says. It’s barely a whisper, but the curve of Bucky’s smile grows deeper at it. Steve wants to reach out for him, and his hand twitches with it. Bucky’s gaze drops immediately. “I’m sorry,” Steve says, hasty, stuffing the offending hand into his own pocket. “I just – can’t believe you’re here. I want to touch you.”

“You can,” Bucky offers. “If you want.”

If Steve _wants_ , like it’s not everything he wants, everything he can think of. The face is probably a no-go zone, still, so Steve goes for the right hand, tugs it out of the pocket it’s nestled in and runs his fingers over smooth warm skin, as gentle as he can make it. Bucky twists his hand so that their palms slide together, and then it seems only natural that their fingers intertwine. It seems incredible, that this moment can be so life-changing for him and yet all the people around him continue on their business as usual. The world keeps turning.

“Will you – come home?” Steve asks, probably more yearning in his voice than is proper. His fucking soulmark chooses that moment to start prickling, and Steve knows that Bucky picks up on the twitch of his leg. Neither of them comment on it, and Steve buries any thought of his soulmate.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I’d like that.”

“Don’t expect much,” Steve says. He’s still holding Bucky’s hand. It feels miraculous, that the two of them can walk down a street in plain view and hold hands. Even after they have been through so much, they are allowed this slice of normality. “I live in Avengers Tower, but it’s not – I don’t spend much time there.” He wishes, abruptly, that he had. He wishes he could have turned his floor into a home that Bucky could feel welcomed in, a place he would want to stay.

Bucky nudges Steve with a shoulder. “You’ll be there, won’t you?” Gently, he brings their still-joined hands upwards and tucks them into his pocket. The angle’s slightly awkward for Steve’s wrist, but he doesn’t even think about moving.

“Yeah,” Steve says.

“That’s enough for me,” Bucky says, and the sideways smile he gives Steve is part shy and part sly and all endearing.

~*~

The remains of SHIELD come knocking, because of course they do. So do the CIA, FBI, NSA, and countless other organisations, including Oversight. Tony labels them all assholes and ups JARVIS’s security setting to eleven. (“It’s one higher than ten.”) Then he makes them watch _This Is Spinal Tap_ so that they get the joke.

“You could have shown us that one part,” Steve points out later. “It is only relevant for literally that one moment.”

“Oh, please,” Tony says. “Why would you miss out on _Spinal Tap_ when you have the radical option of, oh, _not_ missing out on _Spinal Tap_. Sometimes I don’t get you, Steve.”

There doesn’t appear to be any doubt as to where Bucky will live; Tony just does his strange wink-and-nod thing as they retreat, which, Steve is pretty sure, means that he thinks he’s carrying on some sort of non-verbal conversation that Steve is completely missing, and sends them both up to Steve’s floor. There are two bedrooms, but there isn’t any doubt as to where Bucky will be sleeping, either; he shows no interest in any room that Steve isn’t in, as promised.

Their existence together – settles down is probably not a good verb, when the two of them still wake each other up with nightmares and Bucky checks the Internet almost compulsively to see what new hate-filled rants have been posted about the Winter Soldier – but it narrows. Neither of them are particularly keen to go outside, so aside from their usage of the Internet, the two of them simply live together like they used to, gravitating around each other in a quiet, settled sort of way despite all the years they’ve been apart.

Steve not reading the file Natasha gave him ends up being pointless about three months in, when Bucky wakes up with a half-choked scream on his lips one night and starts to tell Steve himself. It is both more and less bearable, to hear it in Bucky’s own words. This time, at least, Steve manages to stay put and listen to everything Bucky dredges up, and holds him tighter as the two of them slip back into sleep.

Natasha goes to the trial of SHIELD, of Pierce, of each and every HYDRA member that she and Nick Fury had dug up while Steve was hunting for Bucky, and then drops in with Ethiopian and Chinese and Persian takeout.

“There’s talk of putting James on trial,” she says, the day after Pierce has been convicted, rather astonishingly quickly. The jury had, apparently, taken just over an hour to decide on a guilty verdict.

“No,” Steve says. Natasha shrugs.

“They can’t do it without James anyway,” she says. “And I don’t think anyone has a chance of getting past Stark security.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to get it over with?” Bucky asks, and Natasha shrugs again.

“There’s also talk of Presidential pardons,” she says coolly. “Don’t worry about it until they decide.” Which is, in theory, good advice, but much more difficult to carry out. Bucky takes to running with Steve on the treadmills in the early morning.

“Man,” Sam says, after he’s joined their session a few times, “I love treadmills. You can’t leave me in the dust.”

“’Scuse you, Wilson, whaddya call that?” Bucky asks, pointing at their respective treadmills, which show that Bucky has run almost three times the distance that Sam has.

“Yeah, whatever,” Sam says. “I’m just saying, most of the time I exercised with Steve all I could see was his back. Now we’re actually next to each other all the way.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Steve grins, as he takes Bucky’s elbow and starts to leave.

“I will!” Sam yells after them.

“So,” Bucky says a little awkwardly as the two of them head back up in the elevator. “You and Wilson?”

“Yeah?” Steve says uncertainly, because he’s not exactly sure what Bucky’s asking. He thinks – but it might not be, and better safe than sorry, especially after the fondue thing with Peggy. She still likes to needle him about that.

“Exercising together, huh?” Bucky asks, and then there’s a flash of his old rakish smile that can still, apparently, get Steve a little weak in the knees, which is good to know. “He see a lot of your back?”

“Oh my god,” Steve says, and he can feel the blush crawling over his cheeks, and everything is Bucky’s fault, the whole reason Steve fucked up the fondue thing was because Bucky spent their entire childhoods making innuendoes out of fucking _everything_. “Oh my – Buck, no –”

“Buck, yes,” Bucky says. “So you and Wilson -?”

“We’re friends,” Steve says, still blushing. It’s really not his fault; Bucky is _looking_ at him, and Steve would swear up and down that the look in his eyes is heat, he’s _seen_ this look before, a lifetime ago, and Steve – Steve wants, warm and swelling. “He’s a good friend.”

“That’s good,” Bucky says, and he’s coming closer, so close, until Steve can feel the heat coming off his body. He wants to lean forward himself and touch Bucky, but his body won’t move, can’t move. Even after months together, he’s terrified of scaring Bucky away. And in moments like these, charged and delicate, that fear is amplified, a hundred times worse. Steve can’t help but think the wrong move will send Bucky packing, for all that it’s been at least a month since that’s happened.

“Why’s that?” Steve manages. He feels hazy enough on Bucky’s presence that he’s nearly sure that his words are as slurred as his thoughts, but Bucky must understand them because his mouth ticks up and he presses even closer, until his hips are holding Steve to the wall. Steve feels like all the breath has left his body, and it leaves him over-warm and utterly disinclined to move.

“I’ve just been remembering a few things, is all,” Bucky says, and the leap of hope in Steve’s chest feels like a heart attack.

“Things?” Steve asks, when Bucky pauses as the elevator doors open behind them.

“Yeah, things,” Bucky says, and pulls Steve out of the elevator with a gentle grip, both big hands spanning Steve’s jaw and neck, cradling him so gently. Somehow, Steve manages to follow Bucky’s lead without toppling them both over in the way that had happened so often when Bucky had tried to teach him to dance. Steve is going to melt right out of his body, he’s sure of it. It must be them Bucky remembers, it has to be –

“It’s us,” Steve gasps. “Isn’t it? Buck - _Bucky_ –”

“Yeah,” Bucky murmurs, and his lips are so close to Steve’s, it’s unbearable, they’re still so _tempting_ –

Steve can’t quite help the way that he surges upwards, then, and from the lazy smile and the light in his eyes Bucky doesn’t mind one bit. And then – their lips meet, old and familiar and practiced and utterly, dazzlingly new as well. Steve wraps both arms around Bucky’s neck and brings him close, closer.

“Missed you,” Bucky murmurs, when they finally let each other go. “Missed _this_.”

“Missed you too,” Steve murmurs into Bucky’s neck. The skin here is so delicate that he can see the motion of blood through veins and arteries. It is nothing less than a privilege to be allowed so close to a place that is so vulnerable, and a kiss will never express that but Steve presses one into Bucky’s neck anyway.

“Were you ever going to tell me, huh?” Bucky asks, and laughs a little when Steve blushes again. His laughter is kind, wrapping around Steve.

“I don’t – I didn’t want you to feel obligated,” Steve says.

“Believe me,” Bucky murmurs, his hand worming underneath Steve’s shirt, “I don’t feel the least bit obligated.”

He leans forward to kiss Steve again, and Steve is utterly, utterly lost. How could he not be, when this is everything he’s been trying to stop himself from hoping for? Bucky’s lips on his, Bucky’s body warm and alive and heavy on top of Steve’s, Bucky hands pushing Steve’s shirt off and running over all the newly exposed skin while Steve gasps and tries not to shake out of his body. He barely knows where he is or how long it’s been – hell, he barely knows who he is, his whole conscious mind narrowed down to Bucky and Bucky’s face and Bucky’s hands –

“Cuisle mo chroidhe,” Steve gasps, feeling half out of his mind with glowing, burning happiness.

“You used to call me that,” Bucky gasps, sounding exactly as put together as Steve, which is to say: not at all. “You used to – pulse of my heart –”

“Yes, _yes_ –”

“My sweetheart,” Bucky says. “My best guy, Stevie –” He cuts himself off by leaning in again, and this time Steve is the one to pull him, away from the wall next to the elevator and towards the bedroom – their bedroom, together. He’s not sure how he manages to navigate them both to the bed, but the brief heartstopping moment where he’s absolutely sure they’re going to fall and hit their heads on something is worth it for the way Bucky presses him into the sheets where they do end up, laughter bubbling between them.

Steve’s drunk on Bucky, on his touches and his words and the way he kisses. It’s the only reason he doesn’t even think to protest when Bucky pushes at his pants, the only reason that he helps. He doesn’t even realise what he’s done until Bucky stops moving entirely.

Steve still doesn’t get it then, he’s been rendered that slow. But when he looks down the splash of his soulmark is darkly vibrant against his skin, and it feels like he’s been doused with ice water.

“Bucky, I – Buck –” Steve stutters. All that glorious hazy happiness is gone in an instant, and Steve is frozen. And then he’s not, and he clutches at Bucky’s wrist. His heart hammers inside his chest. “I know you don’t – I know it’s not – but fuck it, Buck, fuck them, I want you, you’re all I ever wanted, cuisle mo chroidhe – Buck, please –”

“You have a mark,” Steve distantly registers Bucky saying, at the same time. “Oh, I hoped –“ He presses a finger against the mark on Steve’s thigh, and warmth spreads through Steve’s entire body despite the fear that pervaded it just a moment ago. “My best guy.”

“I – what?” Steve asks. “What’re you talking about?” It’s impossible, what he could be saying. What Steve so _wants_ him to be saying.

“I have a mark,” Bucky says. “I wasn’t sure if I remembered right, but – it was the only thing they couldn’t properly get rid of. And it came back in last week.”

“Show me,” Steve says, even though he doesn’t completely understand what Bucky’s saying, and it feels like he’s begging. And then Bucky pulls down his pants, and tucked into his hipbone is a mark that – it looks exactly like the one on the inside of Steve’s thigh, gentle curve and two small uneven dots, and this is impossible but it’s not, it’s real, it’s happening, oh fuck –

“Is it not – it is, I’m sure it is,” Bucky says, brow furrowed. “Steve –?” A note of doubt creeps into his voice, and Steve grips his wrist tighter, tries to banish that sound as best he can.

“When did – I thought you didn’t have a mark,” Steve whispers,

“I – don’t know, exactly,” Bucky says. “I think – I think I remember it on the first – in Azzano. And they burned it off. But it grew back in, a few years later, so they did it again, and – the burns healed fast, but the mark took longer to come back in. I think.”

“Mine came in when I was training, before I was Cap,” Steve says. This time he knows his voice reflects the daze he’s in. He wants to touch Bucky’s mark so badly it feels like his fingertips are aching. “I wasn’t – I was so upset. I knew you didn’t have a mark, before you shipped out. And I was already older than people who got soulmarks, and you’re older than me –”

“The scientists were so fuckin’ frustrated, every time it grew back in,” Bucky says. “None of them could take it away completely, they couldn’t take you –”

“Buck,” Steve breathes, and it feels like being reborn, flushed and radiant and delighted. “Buck, you – you’re my soulmate. You’re _mine_.”

“You’re mine,” Bucky breathes right back, and this time it’s not his fingers he presses to Steve’s mark, it’s his lips, and Steve nearly cries out, shaky from the warmth that seems to settle right in his bones at the touch.

“I spent so long – hating that mark,” he confesses. “I thought it was taking you away from me. I was so sure I loved you, I was right, I thought – Bucky, Bucky, cuisle mo chroidhe –”

“I know,” Bucky murmurs, and surges up to kiss Steve and return the endearment. Steve finally lets his hands go, lets himself touch Bucky’s mark, run his fingers across it, and the shaky moan it gets from Bucky is everything he’s ever wanted, he’s sure of it.

There isn’t much talking after that at all, and it’s getting dark before either of them are inclined to try being articulate.

“I – don’t get me wrong,” Bucky says sleepily, his fingers settled in the spaces between Steve’s ribs, “but – I’m sort of glad it happened like this. You were going to love me anyway.”

“I loved you before a soulmark said I had to,” Steve points out, and he can feel Bucky’s hair on his skin as the other man nods in agreement. “But,” Steve admits, and even he can hear his tone going softer, “I’m glad you’re my soulmate, in the end. It makes it – better.”

“Me too,” Bucky agrees. “This way I know you’re not going to storm into heaven to pick a fight.”

“I wouldn’t _storm into heaven_ ,” Steve protests, somewhat sleepily. “I’d – I’d stick both middle fingers up and face God and walk backwards into hell.”

Bucky snorts loudly into Steve’s skin, and Steve is addicted to the way it feels, the way Bucky’s smile feels tucked against his chest. “You would,” Bucky agrees. “Fighty little bastard.”

“You love me,” Steve says, with a moderate amount of confidence that plummets by the instant once the words are out.

“Yeah,” Bucky admits on a sigh, before Steve’s self-confidence reaches terrifying levels. “Yeah, I do.”

“I love you too,” Steve says, and it feels like he is overflowing. Even as he slips into sleep, he tucks Bucky closer into his body, and Bucky comes so willingly that Steve can’t help but smile, and press a kiss to messy dark hair.

**Author's Note:**

> “Now it isn’t that I don’t like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet I’m strangely drawn to you, but – well, there haven’t been any quiet moments,” is from Bringing Up Baby, 1936, because i like the thought of steve liking screwball comedy
> 
> "face god and walk backwards into hell" is, of course, from the incomparable wint twitter channel. a+ stuff


End file.
